An amber mist fills the late afternoon sky as I pedal down Via Ghiarata near Piumazzo, a small village not far from my town. The ground trembles as giant New Holland combines roll through the fields stirring up clouds of dust. Mourning doves nod their heads in approval from electrical wires, anticipating the feast to come. It’s harvest time here in the breadbasket of northern Italy.

Every day brings new changes to the landscape. Giant, golden bales of hay sprout like mushrooms over night. Water gushes through an irrigation ditch. A shirtless vintner checks his vines from a small stepladder.

One day the fields are full of waist-high stalks of grain, the next a tractor has tilled the soil, turning over large chunks of brown earth. Perhaps I’ve been in the hot sun too long because the overturned fields are starting to look like giant pans of brownies.

Diesel fumes, cut wheat and lavender permeate the air. I pull over to let a tractor squeeze by. When I resume, furious bees appear from out of the sun. One or two riccochet off my helmet and upper arm as I forge ahead. All of the comotion has disturbed their diligent work in the pear orchards. They want someone to blame and I provide a tempting, slow-moving target for their wrath.

I set my own personal bee-sting record in 2005—I was drilled four times in the face in three months. Moreover, here on these narrow Italian roads, you don’t dare flinch or swerve. Just bear down on the handlebars, grin and take the pain while leaving a tapestry of profanity in your wake. Son of a &^%$#@!

But that’s not the funny part.

Remember, the stinger is still embedded right in that wafer-thin area of skin next to your nose, continuing to pump liters of venom into your mug. The idea is to continue pedaling in a straight line while reaching up with your pinkie finger to dislodge the offending foreign body. Pay no attention to the guy in the Audi TT, taking a sneak peak at his text messages, aiming right for you. You then reach down with your other hand, grab your water bottle—praying it still contains liquid— and squirt the precious nectar onto the throbbing wound. Hopefully, you aren’t allergic. Luckily, I am not. It smarts something fierce, but you go on your merry way satisfied in knowing that said bee will not make it back to the hive for dinner.

Closer to home, the sounds of summer reverberate through the narrow alleys of Bazzano. The bees may be working in the countryside but the teenagers—out of school now—are definitely not. The guys buzz around town on scooters in small rat packs like hell’s little angels, their girlfriends shrieking in delight from the rear seats. Their unlucky brethren—those in the final year of high school—have been cramming for the Maturità, (the national exam that grants access to university) and have had to take a rain check on all of the fun.

Village life in the summer can be rather sleepy. The heat tends to dampen the spirits. You work up a sweat just typing on the computer. There are fewer children playing outside; the grandparents have swooped down and carted them off to the seaside. The cool crowd lounges in cafes until they stumble home drunk, singing underneath my window.

On a normal night, after dinner and some work, I am left with TV. Now, Italian TV is normally bad enough by itself, but with everyone’s windows open on warm evenings I get to hear all the channels at once. Italy seems to create almost no original programming—at least on free TV. The RAI public channels are still stuck in a time warp broadcasting variety/game shows with sexy girls just like they were 40 years ago. Berlusconi’s Mediaset channels are filled with commercials and dubbed American, French or German police shows. In the summertime it is worse—there are endless reruns and ‘best of’ specials. But, every now and then, you get lucky and they show a recent Italian movie.

Fortunately, friends spared us from the misery that is TV by offering an invitation to see some real drama on Saturday night. A local theater troupe was staging a performance about the trials and tribulations of Copernicus and Galileo at the observatory at Loiano, in the hills south of Bologna near the border with Tuscany.

The actors performed the play underneath the large, white dome containing the telescope. In the first act, Copernicus debated the Sun. For the second, we left the building to traipse up a muddy trail to a smaller observatory where Galileo faced the Roman Inquisition for suspicion of heresy.

I must admit that my eyelids did fall once or twice in the darkness of the theater. But it was very interesting all the same. In fact, I had never been inside an observatory before. And the evening was definitely less painful than bee stings or Italian TV. Furthermore, the sage tortelloni, steak, Montepulciano wine and chocolate torta smothered with mascarpone I had at a nearby restaurant afterward didn’t hurt either. I’m a cyclist…I’ll endure anything as long as I get to eat afterward.